“If sweetness can win”: The religious discourse of Adventure Time
This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but, if sweetness can win (and it can), then I’ll still be here tomorrow to high-five you yesterday, my friends. Peace.
—The Royal Tart Toter1
1 Adventure Time, “The Other Tarts,” episode 35 [season 2, episode 9], (originally aired January 3, 2011). The Royal Tart Toter is an insane old gingerbread man. He delivers this monologue to a room full of people he does not know are there.
This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but, if sweetness can win (and it can), then I’ll still be here tomorrow to high-five you yesterday, my friends. Peace.
—The Royal Tart Toter1
1 Adventure Time, “The Other Tarts,” episode 35 [season 2, episode 9], (originally aired January 3, 2011). The Royal Tart Toter is an insane old gingerbread man. He delivers this monologue to a room full of people he does not know are there.
Quote:Adventure Time is a cartoon series currently in its fifth season on Cartoon Network. It is nominally a children’s show, and children do watch it, but given the complex narrative, characters and cosmology that the series develops, it deserves adults’ attention as well. Its setting is Ooo, a magical landscape that teems with diverse, intelligent, non-human beings. These beings are the descendants of people and animals that mutated after the nuclear apocalypse, or “Great Mushroom War,”one thousand years before the series’ action takes place. In this essay I analyze the religious elements of Adventure Time, drawing parallels with various religious traditions in order to flesh out these elements’ implications.
I argue that the series acts as a “counter-hegemonic discourse” in the context of the contemporary American religious landscape, challenging mainstream Christian conceptions of eschatology, cosmology, death, morality and suffering, and developing an alternate narrative through which to understand ourselves, our world and our future.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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